Iran Tries to Infiltrate Israeli Rocket Alert System

The Fellowship  |  February 25, 2019

For the people of Israel, the red alert system that warns of rocket attacks is a literal lifesaver, which makes this latest report especially troubling. The Times of Israel’s Judah Ari Gross tells us that the IDF has for the past two years been thwarting Iranian attempts to hack Israel’s rocket alert technology, which would endanger countless Israelis:

The Israeli military detected and blocked an attempt by Iran to infiltrate its missile warning system in 2017, preventing a potentially life-threatening situation in which Israeli citizens could no longer rely on the sirens that alert them to an incoming attack, a senior cyber defense official told the Bloomberg news outlet on Monday.

The Iranian effort was first spotted in 2017 and, once its target was understood, the Israel Defense Forces worked to block the cyber attack and track the hackers, Brig. Gen. (res.) Noam Sha’ar, the outgoing head of the cyber defense division of the military’s Cyber Defense Directorate, told the website.

“We dealt with them and built another barrier and another monitoring system to make sure we could stop them if they tried again,” Shaar told Bloomberg.

Israeli and Western defense officials have long warned that Iran was a world leader in cyber warfare capabilities, having invested considerable money and resources in the field.

Last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Islamic Republic “attacks Israel on a daily basis.”

“We monitor these attacks, we see these attacks and we foil these attacks all the time,” Netanyahu told a gathering of government officials…